BICS and CALP
Cummins (cited in Baker, 2006) noted a distinction between BICS, Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, and CALP, Cognitive Academic language Proficiency. BICS is conversational and picked up relatively easily in everyday conversations. CALP is more technical and mainly concerned with reading and writing. BICS is context embedded and cognitively undemanding, whereas CALP is context reduced and more demanding cognitively. I have included a copy of Baker's study below...
Gibbons (2002) suggests using students’ BICS skills to scaffold them towards CALP writing and gives an example of a science teacher doing this in a unit on magnetism. Unit, moving through 4 stages. Stage 1. Doing an experiment. Groups of students were given different experiments. Each group had several activities to undertake and then describe what happened to each other. Stage 2. Introducing Key Vocabulary. At this point the teacher introduced the words “repel” and “attract” to replace the students description of “stick” and “push away”. Stage 3. Teacher-Guided reporting. Prompted by the teacher, the groups reported back to the class using a more formal structure, closer to scientific writing. Stage 4. Journal Writing. After the reporting session, students wrote what they had learnt in their journals. It was evident that the teacher guided reporting had influenced the expression and vocabulary use in the journals. The responses later served as a source of information when writing a formal report on magnetism.
You can find the complete chapter below. If you were going to use this method, it would be important to read it first as I have not done it full justice in this brief summary. The method could be adapted to most subject areas.
BICS and CALP
Cummins (cited in Baker, 2006) noted a distinction between BICS, Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, and CALP, Cognitive Academic language Proficiency. BICS is conversational and picked up relatively easily in everyday conversations. CALP is more technical and mainly concerned with reading and writing. BICS is context embedded and cognitively undemanding, whereas CALP is context reduced and more demanding cognitively. I have included a copy of Baker's study below...
Gibbons (2002) suggests using students’ BICS skills to scaffold them towards CALP writing and gives an example of a science teacher doing this in a unit on magnetism. Unit, moving through 4 stages.
Stage 1. Doing an experiment. Groups of students were given different experiments. Each group had several activities to undertake and then describe what happened to each other.
Stage 2. Introducing Key Vocabulary. At this point the teacher introduced the words “repel” and “attract” to replace the students description of “stick” and “push away”.
Stage 3. Teacher-Guided reporting. Prompted by the teacher, the groups reported back to the class using a more formal structure, closer to scientific writing.
Stage 4. Journal Writing. After the reporting session, students wrote what they had learnt in their journals. It was evident that the teacher guided reporting had influenced the expression and vocabulary use in the journals. The responses later served as a source of information when writing a formal report on magnetism.
You can find the complete chapter below. If you were going to use this method, it would be important to read it first as I have not done it full justice in this brief summary. The method could be adapted to most subject areas.
Here is the power point display used at the PD session